Edmund Burke, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The distinction begins with the passions, not with objects. I argued in the Enquiry — my Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, first published in 1757 — that before we can speak of aesthetic experience at all, we must understand what the mind is doing when it responds. The leading passions divide into two great classes: those belonging to self-preservation, and those belonging to society.1
This division is not ornamental; it is the foundation on which everything else rests. Self-preservation turns on pain and danger. When those causes press immediately upon us, the experience is simply painful. But when we have an idea of pain and danger without being actually in such circumstances — when the threat is held at a distance by curiosity, sympathy, or imitation — the result is what I call delight, a word I use precisely to distinguish it from positive pleasure.2
Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime. The passions of self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions, and the sublime is accordingly the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.3 Beauty is founded on the opposite principle entirely. The social passions — love, affection, tenderness toward women, toward men, toward the animate world — rest on positive pleasure, not on the modification of pain.4
Beauty is the name I give to all such qualities in things as induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness, or some other passion most nearly resembling these.5 Where the sublime astonishes, beauty attracts; where the sublime overwhelms, beauty wins. The contrast, when drawn out fully, is remarkable in its consistency. Sublime objects are vast; beautiful ones comparatively small.
The sublime is rugged and negligent; beauty should be smooth and polished. The sublime tends to the right line, or deviates from it with force; beauty shuns the right line and deviates insensibly. The sublime is dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate. The sublime is solid, even massive; beauty is the opposite of all this.6 These are not accidents of description.
They follow from the causes: one founded on pain, the other on pleasure, and those causes maintain an eternal distinction between them — a distinction never to be forgotten by anyone whose business it is to affect the passions. One further point deserves emphasis, because it is easily missed. I am not recommending beauty over the sublime, or the sublime over beauty, as if one were superior.
What I insist upon is that the two must not be confused. When an object is intended to affect the mind by the force of some predominant property, the effect will be more uniform and perfect if all the other qualities of the object tend in the same direction.7 To blend the sublime and the beautiful carelessly is to dilute both. The great has terror for its basis, modified into astonishment; the beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure and excites what we call love.8
Keep those principles distinct, and you have the instruments of a genuine aesthetics. Confound them, and you have only a pleasant muddle.
The division of the 'leading passions' into those of 'selfpreservation' and 'society' perhaps recalls the discussion of 'self-love' and 'benevolence' in Butler, Hutcheson, and others... For him they are directly connected with the central problem: the distinction between the sublime and beautiful.A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 41–42
The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure.A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 183–184
the sublime is 'productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling'.A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 42–43
the second division of the passions—those relating to society—is founded on love of woman (society of sex) or of men and the animate world (general society); love is a positive pleasure, and its object is beauty.A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 42–43
beauty; which is a name I shall apply to all such qualities in things as induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness, or some other passion the most nearly resembling these.A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 183–184
sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be smooth, and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line... beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive.A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, p. 256
when any thing is intended to affect the mind by the force of some predominant property, the affection produced is like to be the more uniform and perfect, if all the other properties or qualities of the object be of the same nature, and tending to the same design as the principal.A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, p. 256
the great has terror for its basis; which, when it is modified, causes that emotion in the mind, which I have called astonishment; the beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure, and excites in the soul that feeling, which is called love.A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, p. 292